Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Timothy Leary Quotes

"People use the word "natural" ... What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the sunday school teachings."

"I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen."

"If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people."

"Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interact harmoniously with the world around you — externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity."

"We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go."

"That’s the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA."
Discussing CNN’s Crossfire as quoted in Rolling Stone

"The universe is an intelligence test."

"I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life."

"A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures."

"Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done."

"We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art."

"In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show."

"Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top."

"What I feel or believe or experience is my business, and what I do is all our businesses; and reward or punish me according to whether I play the game well — ethically and rightly — or unethically."

"Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences."

"When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to "drop out," "turn on," and "tune in." This period of robotization is called the Kali Yuga, the Age of Strife and Empire..."

"If you are serious about your religion, if you really wist to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides telescopes are unnatural."

"My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in."

"I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration."

"Science is all a metaphor."

"The mark of a basic shit is that he can’t mind his own business."
(also attributed to William S. Burroughs)

"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition."

"At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos."

Thanks to Dan for the heads up.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would be interested to hear your take on people such as Bill Keller and Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer (somehow scary this dude :).

What is it? I sense so much hostility from them. They really don't like Oprah and they really don't like Eckhart Tolle.

(Didn't know where else to put this message. So, sorry that it's out of Leary topic.)

- jj

Anonymous said...

Oh, and sorry about sending so prickly material.

- jj

Dedroidify said...

Geez something like this again, people you have to upgrade your BS filters.

They're both Christians, they have a Christian Belief System, they have BS filters the size of planets, the only way one gets through to these people is through a bible.

I've seen many Christians looking for excuses to revert back to their old - more secure & stable but illusionary & fundamentalistic - belief system after hearing Tolle or other mystics. I think it's hilarious and depressing.

I find Christians are pissed and confused about mystic teachings telling them to take responsibility for their own lives and finding divinity and truth within - because that's the opposite their religion has been doing.

Well I'm sorry I'm not patient enough to deal with folks like that, if one thinks the BS out of the many available ones they got from your parents or picked out later on was the right one, what did they think all the others were for?
They're just divide & conquer BS. Not truth.

Anonymous said...

What I thought funny was how the Lutzer uses that funny preacher man style to end his sentences. Really weird.

- jj

Anonymous said...

I noticed I too was depressed after listening these bozos. The reason I posted the links to you was to see if you could juice something valuable from those examples. Again, sorry for sending so contaminated material to you. It obviously spoiled at least a minute of your day.

At times I find myself too impatient to handle them, either. What I have begun to understand is how to use such moments to realize something: It is easier to handle fear than hate. The moment I let these people to piss me off is the moment when the other horn of the raging bull has caught me. It doesn't mean we should accept such foolish people and their stupidity but we can make the moment when hate is in danger of rising a moment of spiritual practice also.

To me Mr. Keller and Lutzer seems like ideal examples of how energy vampires work. What they need is the fear that their followers are exhibiting in their meetings. What they can use to bolster defenses is all the hate that is directed from the outside to them.

Fear or hate, either one will work for them just fine. Either you fear them and be controlled by them, or you hate them and feed them energy through their diciples.

The preacher probably feels incredibly energized in the center of their frightened audience. It might be also what drives some of them to partly believe in their own delusions. Too bad its such an inverted field of energy that only drains the people around them and destroys everyone else seen as the enemy.

Fear and hate. Those are the two that can break you.

- jj